From Youtube video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4

2.00 the first great technology transfer, when two independent simple cell bumped into each other and instead of eating each other, they decided to live together, giving rise to the eukaryotic revolution. Then we had the Cambrian revolution.
4.20. Evolution as research and development – this is a design process that exploits information in the environment to create, maintain and improve the design of things.  If the brilliant outcomes of evolution are not design then nothing is.
5.20. Two main varieties of design – 1. Evolution by natural selection and 2. (Human) intelligent design. There have been intelligent designers for a long time, just not millions of years. Intelligent design began around 100,000 years ago with modern humans.
6.00 Evolution is purposeless, foresightless and extremely costly – trillions of organisms dying childless (99% of everything that ever lived died childless) and it is slow; it takes millions of years.
6.45 By contrast, intelligent design is purposeful, goal-directed, somewhat foresighted (not as foresighted, as it often thinks it is) and it is cost-controlled.  And it is usually relatively fast.
7.24. Evolution may be slow and costly but it is brilliant. Francis Crick teased his colleague Lesley Orgel by coining Orgel’s Second Rule – ‘Evolution is cleverer that you are’ – the process of natural selection, though it is mindless, purposeless, without imagination, produces designs that are more cunning, more devious and more efficient than most human beings can imagine.
8.20  Intelligent design now exists and it is getting more intelligent. Here is an arresting example:

On the left is an Australian termite castle, on the right is Sagrada Familia – remarkably similar in overall shape and structure and materials etc. But the processes by which these two structures have been created is fundamentally different – the termite castle is built by millions of clue-less termites – there is no boss termite, no architect termite, no contractors, or sub-contractors, just millions of termites doing their own mindless tasks and amazingly the termite castle with many outstanding design features emerges from their very competent but clue-less behaviour.  The Sagrada Familia, on the other hand is the result of an archetypal, charismatic, mad, genius hero. The top-down king of design, who had blueprints, manifestos and proof of concepts and it was all planned out in advance. Architect and artist Gaudi lorded it over his people, who in turn lorded it over their people who in turn lorded it over the stone-cutters and builders.  

10.55 So, Dennett’s question is what’s the difference between 70 million clueless termites, building a termite mound and 86 billion clueless neurons in Gaudi’s brain building Sagrada Familia? How do you get a Gaudi-type mind out of a termite-colony-type brain? Termites, wonderful as they are, they’re not going to write any poems, they’re not going to invent new forms of government, they’re not going to build ships. Yet the entire colony is not that dissimilar from the neurons

12.40 The short answer, from a former student of Dennett’s, Bo Dalbohm (citation), is that “you can’t do much carpentry with you bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain”. A termite colony is like a bare brain – it is well equiped to do some highly specific things but it cannot do much thinking. An intelligent designer, by contrast has a brain that is very well-equipped with thinking tools. Where did they get their thinking tools?

14.10 The long answer is cultural evolution. The process of natural selection of cultural items designed thinking tools that impose novel structures on our brains. Over the course of thousands of years, virtual machines evolved that could travel and spread and be installed on different individual brains, giving those brains powers that they would not otherwise have had. Or as I like to put it, they are apps that we download into our neck-tops. And I mean that almost literally. Our basic mammalian brains are like computers with only a rudimentary operating system. And then we pile in the apps, with many apps depending on other apps and in the end you have a multi-competent system that can do things the bare brain cannot do by itself.

16.45 Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning. Robert MacKenzie Beverley 1886 presented Darwin’s argument as suggesting that “in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it”. The inversion of reasoning is to “think that Absolute Ignorance is fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill”.

18.31 Turing’s inversion of reasoning. “In order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is.” Turing realised that the current computing machines; often women who had studied mathematics at university, could be replaced by early computers that had had the comprehension of what they were doing, carefully laundered out.

19.21 All of which leads to Dennett’s bumper sticker – competence without comprehension. We don’t live in a mind-first universe, we live in a matter-first universe and the invention of mind was a very recent invention on this planet. Termites are not intelligent designers, beavers are not intelligent designers. We are the first truly intelligent designers and we came along very late in the evolutionary tree of life.

19.30 The Macready Explosion: 10,000 years ago, the human population + livestock + pets was about 0.1% if the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today it is 98%. This is probably the biggest, fastest change the planet has ever seen. This was broght about by the invasion of the human brain by memes. They key is that we don’t have to invent all these building blocks of culture by ourselves e.g. we don’t need to design our own alphabet in order to write. So the MacCready explosion is an explosion of competence. To begin with there was no comprehension behind this competence but that soon changed.

28.15 Free-floating reasons. Trees have reasons. Fungi have reasons. Bacteria have reasons. There are reasons why the component parts inside bacteria are the shape they are. The tree, fungi and bacteria didn’t know these reasons. It is only when a clever scientist analyses a bacterium in huge detail that the reasons for their inner shape becomes apparent. We shiver, we blink, we vomit, although we may not understand the reasons why we do so. So, you don’t need a mind to have reasons.

31.30 So how do we get a Bach mind out of a termite colony brain? How do we get intelligent design, with representation of reasons etc. out of 86 billion mindless neurones? The answer is the second great endosymbiotic revolution. We are apes with infected brians.

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian spaces

Okay, my reflection on this bit is that Dennett’s main issue is to do with design-as-a-noun versus design-as-a-verb. The termite castle is a design (noun) – it has astonishing characteristics, which clearly didn’t come about by chance. The challenge, however, is working out in what sense was it designed (verb). Clearly not by any individual termite. Not by the termite colony that built it. If it was designed (verb) it was by evolution. Except this isn’t usually what we consider to be design. This termite castle only exists because a million different termite castles collapsed. With each collapse, the reproductive success of that castle’s builders suffered, thereby fractionally changing the genetic makeup of the local termite population, making their building technique slightly less likely to be repeated. Through this agonisingly slow, hugely wasteful, trial-and-error process, the design (noun) of the termite castle improved.